Resources for Book Groups and Teachers
Reading Group Guide to Marmee & Louisa
Reading Group Guide to My Heart Is Boundless
Reading Group Guide to Salem Witch Judge
Reading Group Guide to American Jezebel
Reading Group Guide to Seized
***If your book group would like Eve LaPlante to join you in person or by phone for a book discussion, please contact her at [email protected].***
Q&A with Eve LaPlante about Marmee & Louisa and My Heart Is Boundless
1. What inspired you to write Marmee & Louisa? Had you always wanted to write about the Alcotts, or did the discovery of May family letters and memoirs in your attic prompt your biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother?
It was thrilling to find new papers of the Alcott and May family, but the real inspiration for Marmee & Louisa was a set of mysteries that arose as I began to read and learn more about the Alcott women. There were so many unanswered questions: Was the March family invented by Louisa in Little Women in fact autobiographical, as everyone assumed? Who was the real Mr. March, a character who seems nothing like Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott? Was Marmee, the mother in the novel, an accurate portrayal of her real mother, Abigail? And why was it that the adult Louisa, in spite of her extraordinary success as a writer and entrepreneur, never really separated from her first family? Those mysteries drove me to research and write Marmee & Louisa, which, to my amazement, clarified them all.
2. How did what you learned about Abigail May Alcott in writing this book change your understanding of the whole Alcott family?
Abigail was a great surprise. Unlike the homely Marmee we envision, the housewife and quiet counterpart to her brilliant husband, the real Marmee was a strong, complex woman with dreams that are familiar to women today. Abigail was deeply ambitious and therefore deeply frustrated. From girlhood desired things she could not have: an education, public power, and a voice in the world. As a young woman she questioned the institution of marriage and envisioned herself teaching or writing. But she could never find fulfillment in work or love. Her marriage was marked by deep conflict, long separations, and noisy discussions of divorce. Bronson Alcott’s refusal to work for money left the Alcotts homeless and hungry. Although a married woman was not supposed to work outside the home, Abigail became a social worker and employment agent to support her family. Her long struggle for financial and emotional security spurred Louisa to earn a living. As early as age ten, Louisa felt she had to fill in for Abigail’s absent husband and provider, and at only fifteen she stated her life’s goal: to support the family and make her mother secure. There is no question that Abigail was central to Louisa’s story, if not in quite the way we thought, as the idealized Marmee of Little Women. Abigail’s greatest accomplishment, in her view, was raising daughters who had more options as women than she herself had had.
3. Does this new information about Abigail affect the way we should read and understand Louisa’s work as well as her life?
Absolutely. Abigail was Louisa’s mentor, muse, and inspiration. Not only did she encourage Louisa to write from an early age, but also she provided material for Louisa’s fiction. Abigail encouraged Louisa to read her own private journals, which contained detailed descriptions of Abigail’s marital troubles, dreams, and
frustrations. As the young author pored over volumes of her mother’s inner life, she composed adult novels and sensational stories about violent relationships, abusive marriages, and suicidal women struggling for equality with men. Abigail’s happy childhood, tragic marriage, and aborted career were fodder for Louisa’s imagination. In Little Women and her other juvenile novels, Louisa concealed the messy, painful realities of her own childhood – poverty, marital strife, and an absent father – by incorporating aspects of her mother’s early life into her fiction. In her works for adults, in contrast, Louisa exploited the difficult truths of her own and her mother’s lives.
4. The discovery of the letters in the attic is every biographer’s dream. Can you describe that moment?
Discovering family papers in my mother’s attic was indeed a biographer’s dream. Not long ago, my oldest daughter opened an old trunk to find an 1843 edition of Swiss Family Robinson inscribed by Louisa May Alcott to her 10-year-old first cousin, “from your cousin Louie.” That became the opening scene of Marmee & Louisa. We found May family letters, books, and an 1823 Bible, the handwritten memoir of Louisa’s closest cousin, my great grandmother Charlotte May, and memoirs and letters of Abigail’s brother, her mentor and lifelong ally.
There were other exciting discoveries along the way. I had no idea when I began this book how much of Abigail’s own writings still exist in archival collections. Although family members spoke of having burned all of Abigail’s private papers, hundreds of pages of Abigail’s letters and journals escaped the fireplace – so many indeed that I was able to compile and edit a companion volume to Marmee & Louisa, a compilation of Abigail’s own writings entitled My Heart Is Boundless. Readers can now decide for themselves whether Abigail was, in the words of the Alcott biographer Madeleine Stern, “in some ways a better writer” than Louisa. Another discovery during the research for Marmee & Louisa was a cache of unknown letters penned by Abigail in a house in western Maine, the very house to which she had addressed them in 1848. Each discovery opened another window on the Alcott family.
5. It seems incredible that Abigail has been ignored so long. Hundreds of pages of her private papers have, as you point out, been hiding in plain sight, in archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library. While her husband’s and daughter’s letters and journals have been in print for generations, Abigail’s papers are only now being published and discussed. How do you explain the neglect of Abigail?
The conventional wisdom was that Abigail’s papers were all burned, as Louisa claimed to have done after her mother’s death. Oddly, Louisa made the same claim about her own private papers, but that did not deter scholars from finding and publishing hundreds of pages of her surviving letters and journals. Abigail’s ideas and writings were ignored, and her important relationship with Louisa obscured. One reason may be that as readers of Little Women we feel we already know the character of Louisa’s “Marmee.”
I think there is a larger phenomenon behind the neglect of Abigail. Women were long excluded from American public life, and largely neglected in American history. Think how few female figures there are American history who were not the wives of famous men. In early America a woman was expected to be silent in church and all other public spaces. Women who challenged the established order were hanged as witches or banished as heretics. A powerful woman like Anne Hutchinson, for instance, was seen as a threat to society. This persistent cultural norm helps to explain why Abigail May Alcott’s writings so long hid in plain sight.
6. Can you describe who Abigail was as a woman, and how she did or did not fit into the society in which she was raised?
Abigail did not fit into the society in which she was raised. The ideal woman of her time was a docile, nonintellectual homebody. Abigail was more like women today. She wanted girls to be equal to boys and women to have the same opportunities and responsibilities as men. She held unusual opinions. For example, she desperately wanted women to be allowed vote. She opposed slavery and supported abolition in the 1830s, when to do so was considered insane by proper Boston society. As a social worker she sought ways to alleviate urban poverty, and as a mother she gave her daughters all the encouragement to do whatever they felt called to do – have a career, be married, travel, and seek their fortunes. Those opportunities had not been available to her. Still, she had enjoyed a happy girlhood and grown up in a comfortable house filled with books and sisters – she, like Louisa, was one of four sisters – and a devoted older brother who encouraged her desire to be educated and equal to him.
7. Marmee & Louisa is the third biography you’ve written about your ancestors. Why do you think you are drawn to these stories?
The ancestor stories recounted by my great aunt Charlotte May Wilson were full of drama, adventure, and mystery. But I needed to grow up in order to appreciate them. They seemed frightening to a child. One ancestor she described was a Salem witch judge who later repented and then, as I have learned, became an early feminist. (Abigail and Louisa admired him, as did Aunt Charlotte.) Another ancestor was Anne Hutchinson, whose power in colonial New England led to her banishment as a heretic; several years later she was scalped by Indians in what is now New York City. As a child I could not square the Cousin Louisa described by Aunt Charlotte with the idealized fictional worlds of Little Women, Jack and Jill, and Eight Cousins. This may be a common experience: we often don’t realize our older relatives’ gifts to us until after they’re gone.
When I finally got around to writing about the characters Aunt Charlotte had first described, I started with the earliest figures, in the seventeenth and then the eighteenth centuries. Now, with the Alcotts in the nineteenth century, I had something new: actual family papers in the attic. Decades ago, after Aunt Charlotte’s death, several of her trunks came to my mother. Not long ago, I opened the trunks to find an 1823 May family Bible and books, papers, and photographs of the May and Alcott families.
8. Does your family relationship to your subjects affect your research and writing? Does it make it easier or harder to write a traditional biography?
My family relationship to my subjects gives me a sense of kinship with my subjects but probably doesn’t change the research and writing. There is no question that when I was small I had trouble identifying with my ancestors; and of course a biographer must be able to identify with his or her subjects. As an adult who has gotten to know these characters through their own words and seen them as three-dimensional, flesh and blood people, I’ve developed great sympathy for them.
9. How do you think Abigail and Louisa’s story will resonate for modern readers?
I discovered striking similarities between Abigail and Louisa’s experiences and feelings and ours today. They each tried to live out their dreams of a full life in a world that really did not want or expect them to be more than private figures, mothers and housewives. They rebelled against cultural conventions and tried valiantly to achieve their dreams. In many ways they were a pair, each other’s partner and best friend.
10. What do you want the reader to come away with after reading Marmee & Louisa?
I hope readers will come away was a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a woman in 19th-century America. Women and girls were constrained by the expectation that that they be retiring, docile, and lacking in judgment or stature. I hope readers will come away with a sense of Abigail and Louisa May Alcott as women very much like us, who struggled with the same questions we face: how to balance work and family, how to hold children close while letting them go, how to combine a public and a private life, how to be true to one’s ideals without causing harm, and how to find a voice in a world that does not listen. While women today have infinitely more opportunities available to them, we still face some of the challenges the Alcott women faced.
1. What inspired you to write Marmee & Louisa? Had you always wanted to write about the Alcotts, or did the discovery of May family letters and memoirs in your attic prompt your biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother?
It was thrilling to find new papers of the Alcott and May family, but the real inspiration for Marmee & Louisa was a set of mysteries that arose as I began to read and learn more about the Alcott women. There were so many unanswered questions: Was the March family invented by Louisa in Little Women in fact autobiographical, as everyone assumed? Who was the real Mr. March, a character who seems nothing like Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott? Was Marmee, the mother in the novel, an accurate portrayal of her real mother, Abigail? And why was it that the adult Louisa, in spite of her extraordinary success as a writer and entrepreneur, never really separated from her first family? Those mysteries drove me to research and write Marmee & Louisa, which, to my amazement, clarified them all.
2. How did what you learned about Abigail May Alcott in writing this book change your understanding of the whole Alcott family?
Abigail was a great surprise. Unlike the homely Marmee we envision, the housewife and quiet counterpart to her brilliant husband, the real Marmee was a strong, complex woman with dreams that are familiar to women today. Abigail was deeply ambitious and therefore deeply frustrated. From girlhood desired things she could not have: an education, public power, and a voice in the world. As a young woman she questioned the institution of marriage and envisioned herself teaching or writing. But she could never find fulfillment in work or love. Her marriage was marked by deep conflict, long separations, and noisy discussions of divorce. Bronson Alcott’s refusal to work for money left the Alcotts homeless and hungry. Although a married woman was not supposed to work outside the home, Abigail became a social worker and employment agent to support her family. Her long struggle for financial and emotional security spurred Louisa to earn a living. As early as age ten, Louisa felt she had to fill in for Abigail’s absent husband and provider, and at only fifteen she stated her life’s goal: to support the family and make her mother secure. There is no question that Abigail was central to Louisa’s story, if not in quite the way we thought, as the idealized Marmee of Little Women. Abigail’s greatest accomplishment, in her view, was raising daughters who had more options as women than she herself had had.
3. Does this new information about Abigail affect the way we should read and understand Louisa’s work as well as her life?
Absolutely. Abigail was Louisa’s mentor, muse, and inspiration. Not only did she encourage Louisa to write from an early age, but also she provided material for Louisa’s fiction. Abigail encouraged Louisa to read her own private journals, which contained detailed descriptions of Abigail’s marital troubles, dreams, and
frustrations. As the young author pored over volumes of her mother’s inner life, she composed adult novels and sensational stories about violent relationships, abusive marriages, and suicidal women struggling for equality with men. Abigail’s happy childhood, tragic marriage, and aborted career were fodder for Louisa’s imagination. In Little Women and her other juvenile novels, Louisa concealed the messy, painful realities of her own childhood – poverty, marital strife, and an absent father – by incorporating aspects of her mother’s early life into her fiction. In her works for adults, in contrast, Louisa exploited the difficult truths of her own and her mother’s lives.
4. The discovery of the letters in the attic is every biographer’s dream. Can you describe that moment?
Discovering family papers in my mother’s attic was indeed a biographer’s dream. Not long ago, my oldest daughter opened an old trunk to find an 1843 edition of Swiss Family Robinson inscribed by Louisa May Alcott to her 10-year-old first cousin, “from your cousin Louie.” That became the opening scene of Marmee & Louisa. We found May family letters, books, and an 1823 Bible, the handwritten memoir of Louisa’s closest cousin, my great grandmother Charlotte May, and memoirs and letters of Abigail’s brother, her mentor and lifelong ally.
There were other exciting discoveries along the way. I had no idea when I began this book how much of Abigail’s own writings still exist in archival collections. Although family members spoke of having burned all of Abigail’s private papers, hundreds of pages of Abigail’s letters and journals escaped the fireplace – so many indeed that I was able to compile and edit a companion volume to Marmee & Louisa, a compilation of Abigail’s own writings entitled My Heart Is Boundless. Readers can now decide for themselves whether Abigail was, in the words of the Alcott biographer Madeleine Stern, “in some ways a better writer” than Louisa. Another discovery during the research for Marmee & Louisa was a cache of unknown letters penned by Abigail in a house in western Maine, the very house to which she had addressed them in 1848. Each discovery opened another window on the Alcott family.
5. It seems incredible that Abigail has been ignored so long. Hundreds of pages of her private papers have, as you point out, been hiding in plain sight, in archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library. While her husband’s and daughter’s letters and journals have been in print for generations, Abigail’s papers are only now being published and discussed. How do you explain the neglect of Abigail?
The conventional wisdom was that Abigail’s papers were all burned, as Louisa claimed to have done after her mother’s death. Oddly, Louisa made the same claim about her own private papers, but that did not deter scholars from finding and publishing hundreds of pages of her surviving letters and journals. Abigail’s ideas and writings were ignored, and her important relationship with Louisa obscured. One reason may be that as readers of Little Women we feel we already know the character of Louisa’s “Marmee.”
I think there is a larger phenomenon behind the neglect of Abigail. Women were long excluded from American public life, and largely neglected in American history. Think how few female figures there are American history who were not the wives of famous men. In early America a woman was expected to be silent in church and all other public spaces. Women who challenged the established order were hanged as witches or banished as heretics. A powerful woman like Anne Hutchinson, for instance, was seen as a threat to society. This persistent cultural norm helps to explain why Abigail May Alcott’s writings so long hid in plain sight.
6. Can you describe who Abigail was as a woman, and how she did or did not fit into the society in which she was raised?
Abigail did not fit into the society in which she was raised. The ideal woman of her time was a docile, nonintellectual homebody. Abigail was more like women today. She wanted girls to be equal to boys and women to have the same opportunities and responsibilities as men. She held unusual opinions. For example, she desperately wanted women to be allowed vote. She opposed slavery and supported abolition in the 1830s, when to do so was considered insane by proper Boston society. As a social worker she sought ways to alleviate urban poverty, and as a mother she gave her daughters all the encouragement to do whatever they felt called to do – have a career, be married, travel, and seek their fortunes. Those opportunities had not been available to her. Still, she had enjoyed a happy girlhood and grown up in a comfortable house filled with books and sisters – she, like Louisa, was one of four sisters – and a devoted older brother who encouraged her desire to be educated and equal to him.
7. Marmee & Louisa is the third biography you’ve written about your ancestors. Why do you think you are drawn to these stories?
The ancestor stories recounted by my great aunt Charlotte May Wilson were full of drama, adventure, and mystery. But I needed to grow up in order to appreciate them. They seemed frightening to a child. One ancestor she described was a Salem witch judge who later repented and then, as I have learned, became an early feminist. (Abigail and Louisa admired him, as did Aunt Charlotte.) Another ancestor was Anne Hutchinson, whose power in colonial New England led to her banishment as a heretic; several years later she was scalped by Indians in what is now New York City. As a child I could not square the Cousin Louisa described by Aunt Charlotte with the idealized fictional worlds of Little Women, Jack and Jill, and Eight Cousins. This may be a common experience: we often don’t realize our older relatives’ gifts to us until after they’re gone.
When I finally got around to writing about the characters Aunt Charlotte had first described, I started with the earliest figures, in the seventeenth and then the eighteenth centuries. Now, with the Alcotts in the nineteenth century, I had something new: actual family papers in the attic. Decades ago, after Aunt Charlotte’s death, several of her trunks came to my mother. Not long ago, I opened the trunks to find an 1823 May family Bible and books, papers, and photographs of the May and Alcott families.
8. Does your family relationship to your subjects affect your research and writing? Does it make it easier or harder to write a traditional biography?
My family relationship to my subjects gives me a sense of kinship with my subjects but probably doesn’t change the research and writing. There is no question that when I was small I had trouble identifying with my ancestors; and of course a biographer must be able to identify with his or her subjects. As an adult who has gotten to know these characters through their own words and seen them as three-dimensional, flesh and blood people, I’ve developed great sympathy for them.
9. How do you think Abigail and Louisa’s story will resonate for modern readers?
I discovered striking similarities between Abigail and Louisa’s experiences and feelings and ours today. They each tried to live out their dreams of a full life in a world that really did not want or expect them to be more than private figures, mothers and housewives. They rebelled against cultural conventions and tried valiantly to achieve their dreams. In many ways they were a pair, each other’s partner and best friend.
10. What do you want the reader to come away with after reading Marmee & Louisa?
I hope readers will come away was a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a woman in 19th-century America. Women and girls were constrained by the expectation that that they be retiring, docile, and lacking in judgment or stature. I hope readers will come away with a sense of Abigail and Louisa May Alcott as women very much like us, who struggled with the same questions we face: how to balance work and family, how to hold children close while letting them go, how to combine a public and a private life, how to be true to one’s ideals without causing harm, and how to find a voice in a world that does not listen. While women today have infinitely more opportunities available to them, we still face some of the challenges the Alcott women faced.
~ Resources for Teachers ~
For readers of Salem Witch Judge:
As the winner of the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, Salem Witch Judge is being used by teachers at
elementary and secondary schools in Massachusetts and beyond. In consultation with teachers, Eve LaPlante developed the following plan for teaching from Salem Witch Judge. The author welcomes questions and comments about
this plan. Teachers may also adapt the “Topics to Consider” provided under “Book Clubs.”
Goals: Introduce elementary and secondary teachers to the life of Samuel Sewall as a means of understanding Puritan New England. Provide primary and secondary source excerpts related to the biography of Samuel Sewall that teachers can modify for use with students.
Themes and events in the life of Samuel Sewall:
Suggested texts and sources for teaching from Salem Witch Judge:
— The 1942 mural of Sewall’s apology in the Massachusetts State House. The image appears in the book facing the Introduction, which
discusses factual errors in the mural.
— Old Granary Burying Ground. In the family tomb, Sewall’s encounter with corpses of his deceased relatives was “an awful yet
pleasing treat” (pp. 196-7).
— Nanny Naylor Collection at the Big Dig Museum in Dorchester; the Rebecca Nurse House in Danvers; and sites in Salem.
As the winner of the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, Salem Witch Judge is being used by teachers at
elementary and secondary schools in Massachusetts and beyond. In consultation with teachers, Eve LaPlante developed the following plan for teaching from Salem Witch Judge. The author welcomes questions and comments about
this plan. Teachers may also adapt the “Topics to Consider” provided under “Book Clubs.”
Goals: Introduce elementary and secondary teachers to the life of Samuel Sewall as a means of understanding Puritan New England. Provide primary and secondary source excerpts related to the biography of Samuel Sewall that teachers can modify for use with students.
Themes and events in the life of Samuel Sewall:
- Sewall was born in southern England in 1652, immigrated to Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1661, educated at Harvard (class of 1671, Master of Divinity, 1674), married Hannah Hull (the only child of the wealthy Boston mint-master, John Hull) in 1676, accepted as a member of the Third Church in Boston (Old South) in 1677, the leader for many years of the psalm singing at Old South, elected to the colonial General Court in 1683, appointed to the Salem witch court in 1692, appointed to the Superior Court of Judicature later in 1692, chosen as chief justice of the latter court in 1718, and died at home in Boston in 1730, survived by only three of his fourteen children.
- Eminent historical figures are not infallible; Sewall changed his mind and admitted his mistakes. This makes him familiar and human. In his long repentance he wrote three revolutionary essays on issues that remain current: the evil of slavery; equal rights for Native Americans; and equal rights for women.
- Slavery in early America. Sewall was the author of America’s first antislavery tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” in 1700, when one in five Boston families owned slaves.
- The equality of Native Americans, African Americans, and women.
- The development of colonial governments before the Revolution. The concept of an independent judiciary, so important to the American identify, is usually credited to the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution. However, the independent judiciary in fact arose from the ruins of the Salem witch court. The first independent judiciary in the western hemisphere (which still sits in Boston, as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts) began in 1692. It was created by the same governor who’d created the Salem witch court, and it was comprised mostly of Salem witch judges, including Samuel Sewall.
Suggested texts and sources for teaching from Salem Witch Judge:
- Infant mortality in pre-Revolutionary America. One in two children died before age five, as happens today in some parts of the world. The book opens with the death of Sewall’s newborn son, Henry (p. 9 f). Sewall sings Psalm 21 (pp. 29-30). In contrast, Psalm 51 (pp. 44-45) is more akin to modern hymns. The Puritan/Calvinist worldview entailed the beliefs that God punishes and rewards people for their behavior; natural events have divine meaning; and parents bear the blame for their children’s deaths (p. 66). Compare Puritan days of thanksgiving and repentance with current Thanksgiving practice. While privileged in some ways, these English Americans had many medieval beliefs, few effective medicines, and no germ theory of disease. Enlightenment thinking did not much influence Sewall and his peers (p. 205).
- Puritan family life. The book introduces Sewall’s first wife, Hannah Hull, at age sixteen (pp. 69-70). Childrearing is discussed (pp. 61-63). Sewall advises his teenage daughter Betty on choosing a husband (p. 241).
- The role of women in early America. Chapter 19 (p. 251 f). Sewall’s essay on women’s bodies, “Talitha Cumi,” appears in its entirety (pp. 205-311). Discuss his phrase “the right of women” (p. 257).
- Slavery in early America. Chapter 17 (p. 223 f). Sewall’s essay against slavery, “The Selling of Joseph,” appears in its entirety (pp. 300-304). Slavery was a standard feature of life in colonial Boston and New England. Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans were victims of slavery.
- America’s native people. Discuss John Eliot’s “Indian Bible,” which Sewall carried to England as a gift in 1689. Discuss Harvard’s Indian College and the college’s 1650 charter to educate Native and English men (and the current archeological dig on Harvard Yard). Discuss the famous “Plum Island passage” from Sewall’s 1697 essay “Phaenomena,” which is considered the first-ever work of “American literature” (pp. 211-213, or p. 298 in the original). Sewall supported equal rights and education for Indians (pp. 218-221).
- Sewall’s repentance for his role in the Salem witch hunt. Chapter 14 (p. 185 f). The notion of change and metanoia (p. 43). Sewall dons a hair shirt for the rest of his life (p. 201).
- Additional texts and sources to consider for the classroom:
— The 1942 mural of Sewall’s apology in the Massachusetts State House. The image appears in the book facing the Introduction, which
discusses factual errors in the mural.
— Old Granary Burying Ground. In the family tomb, Sewall’s encounter with corpses of his deceased relatives was “an awful yet
pleasing treat” (pp. 196-7).
— Nanny Naylor Collection at the Big Dig Museum in Dorchester; the Rebecca Nurse House in Danvers; and sites in Salem.
~ Resources for Book Groups ~
For readers of Salem Witch Judge:
In 1692 Judge Samuel Sewall sent 20 innocent people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious Salem witch hunt was a dark hour in American history, later made famous in works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges) and a play by Arthur Miller. Sewall’s involvement might have doomed him to infamy, if not for his public acceptance four years later of the “blame and shame” for the wrongful deaths.
Remarkably, the judge’s story did not end there. Once he realized his error Sewall turned his attention to other pressing social issues. Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored America’s first anti-slavery tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” for which he was ridiculed. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential humanity and rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indians to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes. That essay, composed in 1724 at the deathbed of his adult daughter Hannah, is republished in Salem Witch Judge for the first time.
Salem Witch Judge sheds light on revolutionary ideas that have been buried for centuries. It depicts the psychological journey of a man who personified superstition and discrimination yet transformed himself into a forefather of equal rights and civil liberties.
Topics to Consider:
In 1692 Judge Samuel Sewall sent 20 innocent people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious Salem witch hunt was a dark hour in American history, later made famous in works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges) and a play by Arthur Miller. Sewall’s involvement might have doomed him to infamy, if not for his public acceptance four years later of the “blame and shame” for the wrongful deaths.
Remarkably, the judge’s story did not end there. Once he realized his error Sewall turned his attention to other pressing social issues. Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored America’s first anti-slavery tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” for which he was ridiculed. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential humanity and rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indians to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes. That essay, composed in 1724 at the deathbed of his adult daughter Hannah, is republished in Salem Witch Judge for the first time.
Salem Witch Judge sheds light on revolutionary ideas that have been buried for centuries. It depicts the psychological journey of a man who personified superstition and discrimination yet transformed himself into a forefather of equal rights and civil liberties.
Topics to Consider:
- Why, as a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, did Samuel Sewall decide to condemn and hang people as witches? Had you been there, appointed by the governor to serve as a judge of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, what would you have done? How would you have justified your actions to your peers?
- Consider this quote by the historian Frank Grinnell in 1942 at the dedication of the Sewall mural (“Milestones on the Road to Freedom: 1697, Dawn of Tolerance in Massachusetts: Public Repentance of Judge Samuel Sewall for his Action in the Witchcraft Trials”) in the Chamber of the House of Representatives at the Massachusetts State House: ”[The repentance of Samuel Sewall] represents the greatest movement in modern history, not only in theory, but in its practical application… [It marks] the beginning of the recognition of the ‘quality of mercy’ in human affairs. No principle of Christ has been longer in obtaining whole-hearted acceptance than… the saying, ‘Be ye merciful even as your Father is merciful.’“ Do you agree with Grinnell? What other people or movements in American history emphasize the “quality of mercy” in human affairs?
- What sort of wife was Hannah Hull Sewall? How did her personality (what we know of it) complement Samuel’s character? Could Samuel have accomplished what he did without her?
- Sewall’s final work, which he published in 1725, concerns his sense of a natural “right of women,” a revolutionary notion in English America then. That essay, Talitha Cumi, or “Damsel, Arise,” was ignored then and until now existed only in draft manuscript form at the Massachusetts Historical Society, inaccessible to the public. What life events contributed to Sewall’s late views on gender equality? How do you think his long repentance for the Salem witch hunt may have contributed as well to the ideas in Talitha Cumi?
- Samuel Sewall once described himself as a “lover of music to a fault.” How did music affect and enrich him throughout his life? In particular, how did his daily singing of the Psalms inform him spiritually and emotionally?
- Eve LaPlante compares the Reverend Samuel Willard to Nathan in the Old Testament, and Sewall to King David. Do you agree?
- Given that the Puritans left England largely to escape Catholic influences in the Church of England, it’s surprising to discover similarities between the devotional practices of seventeenth-century Puritans and Roman Catholics. Yet that is what scholars have found. Considering in particular Chapter 15 of Salem Witch Judge, “The Blame and Shame of It,” analyze these links between Catholic and Puritan devotional practices. Do you see similar links today among their spiritual descendants?
- In his remarkable essay Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, Sewall determines that Plum Island, in northeast Massachusetts, is a likely place for Jesus Christ to return to earth at his Second Coming. Perry Miller and other literary scholars consider this essay the first work of American literature in the sense of being conscious of itself asAmerican. Do you agree?
- What was it about Sewall’s character and experience that enabled him in 1700 to stand apart from his society, which was actively engaged in the slave trade, and write the first abolitionist statement in American history?
- What aspects of the Puritan worldview do you see in modern American life? What modern figures or situations might benefit from a perspective like Sewall’s? How might someone today, following his example, experience a change of heart?
For readers of American Jezebel:
Anne Hutchinson, a forty-six-year-old midwife pregnant with her sixteenth child, stood before forty male judges of the Massachusetts Court, charged with heresy and sedition. In 1637, when women could not vote, hold public office, or teach outside the home, the charismatic Hutchinson wielded remarkable political power. Her unconventional ideas attracted a following of prominent citizens eager for social reform. Hutchinson defended herself brilliantly, but the judges, faced with a perceived threat to public order, banished her for behaving in a manner “not comely for [her] sex.” Her story illuminates the origins of our modern concepts of religious freedom, equal rights, and free speech, showcasing an extraordinary woman whose achievements are astonishing by the standards of any era.
Topics to Consider:
Historical footnote: The 2004 presidential contenders, George W. Bush and John Kerry, were direct descendants, respectively, of Anne Hutchinson and John Winthrop.
Topics to Consider:
- Why was the conflict between grace and works so important to this group of early settlers in America? How does this conflict play out in our lives today?
- American Jezebel opens in a courtroom, with Anne Hutchinson and John Winthrop as legal opponents. How are Hutchinson and Winthrop alike? How are they different? How do they compare to the Reverend John Cotton?
- What sort of husband was William Hutchinson? How did he contribute to Anne’s work? Could she have accomplished what she did without him?
- In 1638, explaining the source of her errors, Anne Hutchinson said, “Instead of looking to myself, I looked to men,” implying that “looking to myself” is the proper stance. Discuss how this view foreshadows our modern concepts of individual liberty and freedom of religion and of conscience. You may find links between her statement and later works of American fiction such as Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
- In one of his few recorded statements, made to the ministers of Boston after her excommunication and banishment, William Hutchinson said, “My wife is a dear saint and servant of God.” Was Anne Hutchinson a saint?
- Near the end of her civil trial, after Anne Hutchinson had cleverly parried the judges’ many charges against her, she practically brought on her own conviction by preaching to the assembled men. Why did she do this?
- Consider this quote by Amy Schrager Lang: “The problem of Anne Hutchinson is the problem of the public woman.” What is a public woman, and why is she a problem?
- A reader commented that Anne Hutchinson was not a feminist because she was just following the path of her father, a nonconformist English minister who was jailed for several years by his church. Do you agree? How would you compare Anne Hutchinson’s rebellion to her father’s?
- Hutchinson’s mentor, the Reverend John Cotton, used a Biblical quote—“as the lily among thorns”—to justify his practice of separating his congregation into “lilies” and “thorns” and worshipping separately with the former group. What was the appeal to Anne Hutchinson of such a theology? Does it appeal to you?
- Consider Anne Hutchinson’s words to the ministers who excommunicated her from Boston’s First Church of Christ in March 1638, “The Lord judges not as man judges. Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ.”
Historical footnote: The 2004 presidential contenders, George W. Bush and John Kerry, were direct descendants, respectively, of Anne Hutchinson and John Winthrop.